On our wee sojourn to Strasbourg, we’ve seen some contrasting sights.
We’ve seen the good – the welcome we have received as “blogger-journalistsâ€, both from those we’ve sought views from as MEPs or press officers, not to mention the lengths the European Parliament’s Edinburgh and London offices have gone to in organising the trip and advising us.
We’ve seen the bad – arriving to a Parliament in the middle of a fire drill (though that perhaps qualifies as more ridiculous than bad).
And we’ve seen the ugly – the very ugly views of some of the more right-wing representatives (including UKIP’s Gerald Batten) on the Roma people in the plenary session on ascension of Romania and Bulgaria into the Schengen area.
Indeed, we were pretty taken aback at some of the contributions made to this debate. Some of the language used was more akin to what one might hear in the back of a pub after several too many shandies. On the back of this, we had intended on attending this press conference held by Marine Le Pen, but unfortunately time constraints meant we were unable to make it to that.
I suppose there are a couple of points to make about this. That there are representatives in the European Parliament who hold such distasteful views is not a surprise, but their candour and forthrightness in delivering them in such an open debate was. These views are now a matter of public record, recorded for all eternity on the internet.
Of course it should be noted that these ARE minority viewpoints – held, in the main, by MEPs from parties with whom other parties will not condescend to join in European parliamentary groupings – and which were shunned and even booed when recorded in the hemicycle. Indeed, when a speaker rose to condemn these views and rubbish the claims made by certain far-right MEPs, they were roundly applauded.
The problem, I suppose, is that really no one – well, except for you, intrepid reader – will actually discover that such views are held and declared in Europe’s Parliament. The mainstream media – television and newspapers – particularly in Scotland have ceased to report even semi-regularly from the European Parliament. The result of this is that the words spoken by MEPs in plenary sessions or in press conferences seldom make it back across the English Channel to these shores. There are instead lost in the maze of official reports on the Parliament’s website. Which is probably why these MEPs feel safe enough using such language – because they are not fully held accountable for these views by our media.
So yes – one of our discoveries about the European Parliament is the candour with which representatives discuss topics. There’s much less of a fear of offending potential voters here – which, in some cases, could be a positive if it contributed to a more frank and honest exchange of views. Instead it provides cover for the far-right to espouse views their own electorate would likely find abhorrent.
That’s one of the paradoxes at the heart of the European Parliament – it is certainly the most transparent EU institution, and perhaps more transparent than some national and sub-national legislatures – and yet it is the institution in which that transparency makes little or no difference, since no one bothers to check what their representatives are doing.
As a visual illustration of just how different the European Parliament is to what we are used to in the UK, here’s a classic clip (YouTube) of then MEP Rev Ian Paisley protesting the arrival of the Pope into a plenary session of the EP in 1988.
– blogged from the European Parliament’s media centre in Strasbourg
